I love using Vim for making quick changes to files when I’m working on the command line. I even use the Vim keyboard shortcuts in Sublime Text, and these days I struggle to use any text editor that does not allow me to enable Vim key bindings.

Recently, I found myself needing to copy text to the clipboard from a text file that I had open in Vim. I am pretty ashamed to say that I didn’t think there’d be a key combination to allow me to do this, so I always resorted to using the mouse.

This was getting pretty tedious - I mean, the whole point of Vim is that you shouldn’t ever need a mouse! Obviously there is a way to do it with the keyboard!

Here we go:

"*y

Wait, what? Let’s break that down:

• " - specify a register
• * - use the * (clipboard) register
• y - standard Vim yank command

Note: You will need to have a section of text visually selected to use this command (i.e. by using the v Vim command)

You can also paste in a similar way:

"*p

More information can be found in this StackOverflow thread